The agile team at White Cliff Minerals makes finding gold look easy.

The company is now aiming to treble its Aucu project gold JORC resource in the Kyrgyz Republic, while further proving up its promising gold and nickel assets in Western Australia.

The exceptional Aucu gold-copper project looks set to be a company-maker, but managing director Todd Hibberd is quick to point out the blue sky potential of the WA assets as well.

“Our objective this year is to generate a new JORC compliant resource for the Aucu project,” he said.

“In Australia, our objectives are to discover a nickel sulphide deposit and also prove up an economically mineable gold deposit that we can sell.”

White Cliff has set itself a huge task, but the team has demonstrated it is already on the right track. In Kyrgyz, the company established Aucu’s maiden JORC resource of 1.15 million tonnes at 4.2gpt gold in March after drilling less than 350m of strike to a depth of 100m.

The mineralisation remains open along strike 500m in either direction, and at depth, where drill results from the lower gold zone include 6m at 13.1gpt gold including 1m at 23.1gpt from 47m.

Hibberd said Aucu – where White Cliff has grown its share to 89% – was nothing short of exceptional and had outstanding potential as a major gold discovery.

“The mineralisation starts at surface, you can see it and you can pan visible gold out of it,” he said.

“It’s about as exciting as it can get for a geologist, the first batch of drill holes we did had gold pretty much everywhere. It also ticks all the boxes from a project point of view: in terms of its potential for scale, there’s a copper deposit hanging off the side of it, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of it.

“It’s elephant country.”

Less than 2.5km from Aucu is the company’s new Chanach copper discovery, which has a maiden resource of 10Mt at 0.41% copper for 40,000 tonnes.

The mineralised zone at Chanach also starts at surface and is open at depth and along strike, with multiple targets outside the existing resource.

When RESOURCESTOCKS spoke with Hibberd, he was on his way to oversee a magnetic survey at Aucu that will cover thousands of metres. Workers using backpacks on the mountainous terrain will provide detailed accurate results to guide the next drilling program in August.

“We’re almost guaranteed of success at Aucu,” Hibberd said.

“We are very confident of churning out more gold hits there because we understand the system reasonably well. Overlaying that is the blue-sky flavour of our WA gold and nickel prospects, and any one of them could turn the company into something else if we’re successful.”

During July, White Cliff planned to drill its Red Flag gold prospect near Laverton and the Merolia nickel targets, also in the Northern Goldfields. Both are within 30km of existing mines and established processing plants, and the company is pushing to prove their economic worth.

Hibberd has pruned the company’s WA assets to the most promising sites close to existing infrastructure. The exception in the portfolio is the Mt Remarkable gold project, where in May a prospector operating under a tribute agreement found two nuggets, weighing 248g/8oz and 310g/10oz, worth about $27,000.

“It’s pretty damn exciting, that area has been prospected since metal detectors were invented and people are still finding decent-sized stuff,” Hibberd said.

“Mt Remarkable is very sexy but it’s tricky – it’s like wooing a woman.

“You can drill 10 holes and get nothing, then a prospector can come along next to one of your holes and find nuggets, so we’re going to bulk sample the vein system to see what we get.”

However, Hibberd believes the other WA gold projects have more potential in terms of scale and the opportunity to realise economic value for the company.

“If you prove up a resource and don’t have any capital costs, it makes a lot more sense to sell the project to someone else with infrastructure,” he said.

“It also provides quicker results for shareholders.”

Hibberd also likes White Cliff’s nickel prospects because he believes the price cycle will turn soon and the base metal will be in structural deficit within two years.

“When the nickel price takes off like a scalded cat, everyone wants to be involved so those projects are quite valuable,” he said.

At the Merolia project southeast of Laverton, the company has identified the McKenna and Coglia prospects, which look favourable for massive nickel sulphide deposits. At McKenna, strong nickel anomalies found at surface to date include up to 0.14% nickel.

Hibberd said the electromagnetic surveys and geological setting showed striking similarities to the Sirius Resources-discovered Nova-Bollinger nickel-copper deposit. Merolia’s 771sq.km also includes the Ironstone gold project, where historical drilling results include 24m at 8gpt gold, which is also on the company’s exploration radar.

White Cliff has a busy exploration program planned to capitalise on the current lower drilling costs in Australia.

“Provided you’re well-funded, it’s the best time to be exploring, and I think the market is rewarding people for doing that,” Hibberd said.

“We’ll be generating a lot of drilling information over the six months.”

Back in Kyrgyz, Hibberd said Aucu could be compared to Newcrest Mining’s Cadia-Ridgeway gold and copper porphyry deposits.

“We’ve got a gold-rich zone adjacent to a large copper system but obviously we need do a lot more work to get it to the same scale as Cadia,” Hibberd said.

Aucu is neighboured by multi-million ounce mines and there is good infrastructure and road access.

“Just in our little region, there are three operating mines – one was successfully commissioned in 2013 – and a new one that should commence in the next 18 months,” Hibberd said.

“Kyrgyz ticks all the boxes for infrastructure, a skilled workforce and a supportive government.”

Hibberd said the White Cliff management team had a wealth of experience which helped set the company apart.

“In this market, the key point of difference people need to focus on is the quality of the management team,” he said.

“I’ll leave it to the market to decide … but we’ve been able to run the company pretty cheaply, and the best example of what we have done from a technical point of view is the copper discovery at Chanach and gold discovery at Aucu, and we are quite happy to hang our hats on that.

“We’ve made a major gold discovery in Kyrgyz, and the bulk of our focus is to double or triple the gold resource at Aucu because that’s where the value is.

“It appears to have the scope to be in the order of up to 5Moz of gold – that’s the value proposition of the company, without even mentioning the blue sky in our Australian assets.”

*A version of this report, first published in the July-August 2015 edition of RESOURCESTOCKS magazine, was commissioned by White Cliff Minerals.